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Yes He Can: Ball Corp. CIO on Tech-Enabling Business

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Leroy Williams works in lockstep with the rest of the executive committee at Ball to continually invest in technology that enhances economic value add—the beacon metric for the manufacturer and its shareholders. With his 10-year anniversary as CIO at Ball fast approaching, he must be doing something right.

Over a 20-year career, Leroy Williams has worked in industries as varied as telecom, banking, state government, and manufacturing. While he acknowledges that deep industry knowledge is essential for success, particularly in leadership roles, he’s quick to point out that gaining substantive experience as a technologist and a business leader is even more important.

Currently CIO of Ball Corp., Williams says it’s easy for IT folks to become insular and enamored of technology without regard for what people want and need. To avoid that trap, he’s spent his career toggling between technology and business, and developing a deep understanding of both.

In this Q&A, Williams discusses his role at Ball, how he runs his IT shop, his current top priorities, and the secret to his longevity as CIO. Based in Broomfield, Colorado, Ball is a provider of metal packaging for beverages, foods, and household products, and of aerospace and other technologies and services to commercial and government customers. (The company sold its eponymous glass jar business in 1993.) Founded in 1880, Ball employs more than 14,500 people worldwide, and finished FY2013 with $1.6 billion in operating profit against $8.5 billion in revenue.

You’re a member of the senior executive committee at Ball. Describe your engagement with others on the committee.

Leroy Williams: As an executive team, we spend a lot of time discussing who we are as a company. One of our mandates is to be good stewards of the culture we’ve established, to enhance that culture for the next generation of employees, and to continue promoting the things that have made Ball so successful for so many years.

We talk about delivering economic value, identifying and segmenting our customers, the dynamics of our markets, and how our capabilities can drive additional cost out of the business. We talk a lot about leverage. Those conversations inform decisions about how we prioritize capital.

When leverage is used in a financial context, folks nod their heads. They understand working with banks to increase our leverage so that we can generate a higher return on investment. And in operations, we may discuss our ability to achieve scale and to produce products at a lower price point because of our manufacturing and operating leverage.

But when you say IT leverage, what does that mean? At Ball we’ve actually defined it, as a way to help us prioritize IT investments. IT leverage has two components: efficiency and effectiveness. Efficiency is pretty straightforward: We’re cost-effectively managing all aspects of IT—asset procurement, service delivery, and so on.

IT effectiveness, by contrast, is more complicated, and includes three levers: automation, information, and collaboration.

Automation is eliminating manual processes and increasing productivity using principles of lean manufacturing.

From an information standpoint, we look up and down from the shop floor to the boardroom and ask, “How fast can we know?” How fast can we know a piece of machinery is starting to wear, potentially leading to product quality problems? How fast can we know about a pending demographic shift that will influence our product strategy? How fast can we know about innovations that may allow us to develop a new product or enter a new market?

Collaboration entails taking smart people, focusing them on a problem or an opportunity, and creating a platform for them to work together. Collaboration is important not just within the company, but up and down the supply chain. Everyone needs to be more efficient and more conscious of their environmental impact. (Sustainability is a huge priority at Ball.) Collaborating with your trading partners and your customers is the ultimate form of IT leverage.

Our business—like many others—is constantly under pressure to do more with less and deliver best cost, best value to our customers. We continue to apply all three effectiveness levers to drive continuous improvement. When done right, the value it now generates is nothing less than remarkable.

How is your IT organization structured?

Over the years, I’ve seen a lot of IT models. About five years ago, we settled on our federated structure, which balances responsiveness to the business with a need to leverage economies of scale. Being responsive is being close to the customer and understanding the business at a deep level. We have line of sight IT resources in each of the strategic business units. Their job is to build credibility and relationships, partner with the business on opportunities, and manage risk. They analyze demand for IT services, then focus on the IT investments that will generate the greatest return for that business. To achieve scale, we leverage common applications and shared infrastructure where it makes sense. We also leverage our purchasing power globally to lower our total cost of ownership for IT investments.

Additionally, we have four groups at the corporate level:

The governance, risk, and compliance group manages the portfolio broadly, overseeing the strategic planning process, performance measurement, and sourcing.

The innovation, architecture, and standards group was purposefully carved out, and is dedicated to thinking 12 to 18 months ahead about strategically bringing emerging technologies into Ball. They’re currently looking at big data and analytics, for example.

The enterprise business systems group oversees all the common apps that give us scale.

The global technology operations group runs infrastructure managed services, also to help us operate at scale.

Ball competes in some very different businesses. How does your federated structure support them?

Globally, Ball has three main product lines. The largest is beverage containers. We manufacture billions and billions of cans each year in standard and specialty sizes for carbonated soft drinks, alcoholic beverages, and so on. Next is our food and household business, which manufactures traditional food cans, aerosol cans, and packaging for household and beauty products. Our third line of business is aerospace and defense (A&D).

Even within the federated structure, there’s no one size fits all. We may dial up or down our line of site alignment with a particular business based on its unique requirements. For example, the business needs and stringent regulations and requirements of the A&D business are quite different from the packaging business lines. Bottom line: We leverage economies of scale where it makes sense while providing flexibility and agility for the operating units to move at market speed. And, of course, we’re focused across the board on protecting our critical data assets through global standards and next generation capabilities.

Describe the relationship between business strategy and technology at Ball.

Economic value add (EVA) is the beacon for all Ball business units globally. For Ball, EVA is the ultimate measure of financial performance to drive our capital and resource allocation strategy. It is tied directly to our incentive compensation plan to create alignment from top to bottom; essentially everyone’s performance is effectively considered through an EVA lens.

We also have a broad, 10-year vision called “Drive for Ten” that positions us for the future along five dimensions: geographic expansion, product and service expansion, maximizing business value, innovating, and leveraging technology. In IT we deliver the technology capabilities that enable the business to be successful in terms of EVA and against Drive for Ten. IT is viewed as a key enabler of the business strategy.

It’s no secret there’s a war for tech talent. How’s Ball faring?

There’s a lot of talent here in Colorado, so we’ve done a pretty good job of attracting and retaining the talent we need in corporate IT. However, like so many other companies, we are challenged when recruiting software engineering talent, in particular, in some of our other locations.

Taking a step back, we are very clear on what core competencies we need to retain, build, and grow inside Ball; we partner with others for the rest. Having a balanced sourcing strategy has inoculated us to some degree from the talent shortage going on elsewhere.

In addition, I spend a lot of my time and energy on employee engagement. We have a lot of technology investments underway, but if we don’t have the next generation of leaders to effectively manage this business, then we won’t be here for the next 130 years. Employee engagement is important because it drives motivation.

You’ve defied all odds by remaining in your role as CIO at Ball for 10 years. To what do you attribute your longevity?

Ball is a phenomenal company. We have great people committed to a great mission. Visit any plant or facility around the globe and you get the same Ball feeling. There’s minimal politics, and an open, caring, very professional environment. The company is also very successful. Ball’s corporate performance—the EVA we’ve delivered over the last 10 years—is a huge part of my personal career story.

Of course, at the end of the day I personally have to deliver. According to the results-based leadership model, effectiveness is a product of the sum of 10 personal attributes multiplied by results. So even if I have all 10 attributes, the product is zero if I haven’t delivered. Conversely, if you’re the type of leader who delivers results at all costs and leaves a trail of dead bodies in your wake, then your results will also be zero. It’s a combination of personality, approach, management style, soft skills and so forth, coupled with the ability to deliver around the globe.

At the moment, I’m also fully engaged in our IT strategic review. After 10 years in this role, I requested, and am sponsoring, an outside-in review of what we do. We’re not opening everything for discussion—for example, the federated approach is right for Ball—but we’re taking a fresh look at how best to deliver IT services around the globe. No matter how good we think we are, it’s good to get a fresh perspective and understand the art of the possible, in terms of the end-to-end service delivery model to gain greater IT efficiencies and leverage our critical people resources.

What’s the most significant technology change you’ve experienced in your 10 years at Ball?

The consumerization of information technology. Mobile devices and the ecosystem that has grown up around them have fundamentally changed the end user forever. I vividly remember the days when people were shy about technology. Y2K and even the whole dot-com revolution were somewhat foreign to users. Now I have senior executives providing mobile device support to one another. They understand through personal experience the productivity gains that can occur, and how they can use the information that’s now available to them.

As a result, users are more demanding of technology solutions. In response, I’ve brought more non-IT folks into our organization to bolster our outside-in perspective—the customer and end user perspectives—so we can liaise with the business and truly understand what they need from us. Likewise, these folks help the IT organization better understand the challenges and opportunities the business is facing.

Cloud, social, mobile, analytics, and cyber risk. What are the top two on your agenda now, and why?

Obviously they are all important, but if forced to choose two at this moment I have to say analytics and cyber risk.

Analytics is a huge and growing opportunity. Over the last 15 years or so, we’ve done a good job of driving automation through investments in ERP, CRM, and other systems. Now we’re focused on the vast amount of information coming out of those systems. We’ll have insights into employee behaviors and can use them to further motivate our workforce in a positive way.

The continued growth of sensing technologies creates even more opportunities to leverage information. In the manufacturing world, we can use this information to increase operational performance and asset utilization. This is just one example of the shift that is occurring from the historic analog world to truly digital capabilities made possible by information technology.

Meanwhile, the proliferation of mobile devices and other connected technologies has us now and forever focused on cyber security and on protecting our critical data—from business sensitive to personally identifiable information about our employees to everything in between.

What we did last year is not good enough to protect us this year. We need to continually invest in new tools and skills, and partner with people in the know who can help us fight this daily battle. Balancing the end user demand for simplicity with the need to protect the organization’s critical data assets is now part of daily life for most CIOs.

Last question: You’ve managed to spend your entire career working in Colorado. Have you ever been tempted to go elsewhere?

The short answer is no, I have never seriously considered leaving Colorado. Our family is here, and our kids have enjoyed great stability over the past 10 years—thanks to Ball.

However, I do think about how to make a difference on a bigger level and stay actively involved in the community. STEM is one of my deep passions. Having grown up in the inner city, I am convinced there are more kids like me with the potential of becoming future scientists or engineers. I am not talking about kids on the ends of the spectrum, but rather the ones in the middle that are perhaps going unnoticed. That was me. And supporting innovative approaches to increase the number of non-traditional students pursuing academic and professional careers related to STEM is something that interests me greatly.

Also, I am spending more time as an advisor for technology-based companies. Working with companies that are looking to grow or commercialize new capabilities with global potential is something I find exciting and keeps me on my toes.

Ball continues to be a great place to work. I enjoy what I do and the people I work with. As we continue to expand our geographic reach, perhaps an opportunity will surface requiring me to rethink my position. For now, I just try to stay focused on my family and adding value at work while enjoying over 300 days of beautiful sunshine and fun here in Colorado. Hard to beat!

Yes He Can: Ball Corp. CIO on Tech-Enabling Business

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